A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company's Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia's mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said.

Another person said the idea of Nokia using Android wasn't a part of Microsoft’s discussions with the company about an acquisition, even though that was widely recognized as a possibility.

Windows Phone never fit into Nokia's DNA. It's too closed, too external, too controlled; Nokia had little influence over its own destiny with Windows Phone. It's not surprising that many of the brightest minds in the company left in the wake of the Windows Phone announcement (such as the team now at Jolla).

The problem is not android.
the problem is that both Nokia and windows just threw all the work they had out the window.
Ms completely killed off windows mobile 6, if the would have included some kind of legacy support in the system, they would have had no problems with programs. Instead apple bragged about the app store, when windows phone had thousands already. There is no excuse when I can run opera 10 in windows phone 7 just fine. Or the fact that windows phone had gpu drivers for mobile 6. They didn't know how to transition your their base.
Nokia completely bombed all their base smart phone users by killing off support without a transition in place. What is the upgrade path for n93? Or an Samsung Omnia or HD2? There was nothing but android and ios.

Exactly. I had my pile of cash all saved up to by the N900's successor for Christmas in 2010, when it was supposed to ship.

I would have happily bought it warts and all, and waited for the beautiful UI release in summer 2011 when the N9 finally shipped.

Instead, they deprecated the N9 even before finally selling it, and switched to an OS (and partner) of which I'm quite un-fond. When the Edge failed to win enough funding, and Jolla decided not to ship to the USA (yet), and with my old N900 finally starting to come apart from 4+ years of hard use, I broke down and bought a Nexus 4 on fire sale.

Nice phone, but I'll still pursue an alternative to Android and iOS - perhaps load Ubuntu Touch on it when released. Even a relatively open OS like Android needs good competition to innovate.

Ms completely killed off windows mobile 6, if the would have included some kind of legacy support in the system, they would have had no problems with programs. Instead apple bragged about the app store, when windows phone had thousands already.

One can say the same about Symbian, but Apple did one thing neither Microsoft nor Nokia did. They put all the apps together, in a central repository, and made them easy to find, install, and purchase. That's what sold the App Store, not the quantity nor even the quality of apps at first. With both Windows Mobile and Symbian you had to use the same process of finding, downloading, installing, purchasing, and entering serial numbers you had to go through on your PC. Most people back then didn't even do that; they had their friends do it for them or else they bought programs on CD that came with a slip of paper with the serial number on it. They didn't search for a program, download it, go through online purchasing processes, etc on their pcs most of the time so why would they have ever done it for a phone?
Ms and Nokia both could've stomped Apple if they'd done two things: update their UI, and start a central repository. They both did, of course, eventually do these things, but far too late. Apple had grabbed theirrelatively small, but steady, share, and Android had taken the rest of not only the device market, but the software developers as well.